How many times have you felt like you have more to offer than your church, organization or leader actually realizes? How many times have you felt underutilized, believing you could go further if somebody would just give you the chance? We’ve all experienced those seasons, and perhaps you find yourself in one right now.

So, what do you do when the size of your current opportunity doesn’t match the size of your gifts and abilities? Below are three places to start.

Grow Your Gift

The idea of growing your gift seems counterintuitive when you feel like your gift is already larger than the opportunities before you. After all, if your current job or ministry role isn’t maximizing your existing talent, what’s the point in growing your talent? What I’m about to say might sting, but this is crucial if you find yourself in this place: Maybe your gift isn’t as big as you think it is.

Perhaps the size of your current opportunity actually does match the size of your gift, but your ego is convincing you otherwise. Most leaders will quickly dismiss this notion. Self-aware leaders won’t. Having the humility to see the true size of your gifting is what precedes having bigger opportunities come your way.

Let’s be honest. Most of us think we preach better than we actually do. Most of us think we lead, sing, plan, administrate, write, organize, network, strategize, connect or create better than we actually do. Our small gifts produce disproportionately large egos. The opportunity God calls you to is usually aligned with the ability God gave you.

Just maybe you’re not as good as you think you are. Just maybe you need to seek some feedback and coaching to help you take a God-given gift and grow it to its God-given potential. That’s a hard truth to swallow, but if you’ll embrace it now, it might actually move you further, faster.

Grow Your Character

There is a common danger when it comes to our gifts: We think giftedness is enough. It’s easy to convince ourselves that if our gift just gets bigger, God will automatically bring bigger opportunities. After all, shouldn’t He? Actually, no. In fact, bigger opportunities might actually be our gift’s greatest curse.

When our gift outpaces our character, we wander into a danger zone. When that happens, God will often limit our opportunities so that our character has time to catch up to our gift. We’ve all seen it — when competence outpaces character, it never ends well. Leaders crash and burn when their gifts thrive while their character hides in the dark corners of sin and selfishness.

If you’ll let God grow you, He will be able to trust you with greater responsibility and larger opportunity.

A leadership coach once told me, “Stop asking God to grow your church, and start asking Him to grow you.” If you’ll let God grow you, He will be able to trust you with greater responsibility and larger opportunity. It begins with character.

Grow Your Faithfulness

There is something that happens inside us when we learn to be faithful in the places where God has planted us, and with the opportunities He has given us. The Parable of the Bags of Gold is a perfect example (Matthew 25). After the first two servants doubled the money their master entrusted to them, what did the master say? “Well done, good and faithful servant!”

The size of the opportunity entrusted to them was in direct proportion to the talent each of them possessed. However, the master never defined faithfulness by the size of the opportunity but by their response to the opportunity. The first two servants responded faithfully, while the third servant responded foolishly. Again, faithfulness had nothing to do with the size of their talent — only the size of their response to it.

How faithful are you, really? Do you do the least amount necessary to get by? Do you take shortcuts, give 80 percent, or coast because your gift allows you to? Would your boss say you are truly faithful? What about your real boss, God? The apostle Paul said, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving” (Colossians 3:23-24).

Faithfulness builds patience and commitment inside us. It proves our loyalties, our trustworthiness, and our willingness to commit to somebody else’s vision. Equally important, we learn the boredom of success.

Success isn’t the result of a flashy performance on stage. It’s the result of routines and practices, which often feel boring, day after day, week after week, year after year. Faithfulness is the fuel that drives the boredom of success. Without it, long-term success isn’t even possible.

When Nehemiah set out to rebuild the wall around Jerusalem, he gathered together the Jewish leaders and said, “You see the trouble we are in: Jerusalem lies in ruins, and its gates have been burned with fire. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, and we will no longer be in disgrace” (Nehemiah 2:17).

Nehemiah also told them about God’s favor and provision with the king. So, how did the people respond? Four words: “Let us start rebuilding” (Nehemiah 2:18). And they did.

It’s very easy to become distracted with building our thing. It takes a willingness to grow our gift, character and faithfulness to build somebody else’s thing. But if we’ll commit ourselves to the opportunity God has placed before us — regardless of how big or small it might seem to us — we will simultaneously be cooperating with the interior work God wants to do in our lives.

Grow your gift. Grow your character. Grow your faithfulness. Let God worry about growing your opportunity.